A System for Providing Gracefully Degraded Services on the Internet Under Overloaded Conditions Responsive to HTTP Cookies of User Requests

1. A method for providing gracefully degraded services on the Internet under overloaded conditions, comprising the steps of a) tagging user requests to indicate the status of said requests, and b) providing appropriate level of degraded services gracefully responsive to said tagging information; wherein the said step of tagging user requests is implemented through “cookies”, where “cookies” are messages carried in the header of HTTP user requests.

2. The method of claim 1 wherein said level of gracefully degraded services is based on user profile information.

3. The method of claim 1 wherein said level of gracefully degraded services is based on the degree of resource utilization.

4. The method of claim 1 wherein said level of gracefully degraded services is based on previously promised commitment to said user.

5. The method of claim 1 wherein said degraded services is in the form of delayed services.

6. The method of claim 5 , further comprising the steps of: a) determining if the request is a first time request; b) if not a first time request, determining if the request arrives as previously suggested.

7. The method of claim 5 , wherein delayed services further comprises examining a user profile.

8. The method of claim 5 , wherein delayed services further comprises examining previously promised services.

9. The method of claim 1 wherein said degraded services is in the form of lessor quality services.

10. The method of claim 1 wherein said degraded services includes a compensation.

11. The method of claim 1 wherein said degraded services is a combination of delayed service, a lesser quality content and compensation.

12. The method of claim 1 wherein said level of gracefully degraded services can be further based on club membership specified in the user profile.

13. A system for providing gracefully degraded services under overloaded conditions, comprising: (a) means for tagging user requests to indicate the status of said requests; and (b) means for providing an appropriate level of degraded services gracefully responsive to said tagging information; wherein tagging user requests is implemented through “cookies”, where “cookies” are messages carried in the header of HTTP user requests.

14. A memory medium for a system comprising: means for controlling the system operation to perform the following steps: (a) tagging user requests to indicate the status of said requests; and (b) providing appropriate level of degraded services gracefully responsive to said tagging information; wherein tagging user requests is implemented through “cookies”, where “cookies” are messages carried in the header of HTTP user requests.

15. A signal bearing medium tangibly embodying a program of machine-readable instructions executable by a digital processing apparatus to perform operations to gracefully degrade services on the Internet, the operations comprising: in response to receiving a first user request under conditions of existing or impending overload, appending a status tag to a response page sent to the sender of the first user request; in response to receiving a second user request from the sender, determining an appropriate level of services from a status tag of the second user request; and providing a level of degraded services for the second user request gracefully responsive to said status tag of said second user request; wherein the status tag of the second user request comprises at least one “cookie” message carried in a header of the second user request, which is an HTTP request.